Rami Yoshavev
On Tuesday, January 3, 2006, senior officials at the University of Missouri said that in mid-December 2005, in a study led by Dan Stever Boone and mathematician Prof. Curtis Cooper, the largest prime number known to science was found, and this after 700 computers were programmed for this unique task.
A prime number is a natural number, greater than one, and divisible only by itself and one. Among them you can find the more familiar prime numbers such as - 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47...
The length of the new prime number is 9.1 million digits long and is a Marsan number known as M30402457, which is 2 to the power of 30,402,457 minus one. Marsan numbers is a special category of numbers that is expressed in the number 2 to the power of another prime number minus 1.
The two researchers were excited by the new discovery, which they had been looking forward to for a long time. The above research was aided by a search for Marsan numbers on the Internet with the help of thousands of volunteers worldwide who ran programs on their personal computers to initially find the largest Marsan.
Research of this kind contributes a lot to the development of science and practical applications such as cryptography. A well-known application that uses prime numbers is the RSA code for encrypting public keys on the Internet, the code is based on the (relative) ease with which large prime numbers (of hundreds of digits) can be found, and on the enormous difficulty of factoring a large number, which is a product of two prime numbers. Therefore, studies of this type help, among other things, to build stronger encryption software for safer surfing, performing banking operations without fear and transmitting classified messages between the various security forces.
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